Linux in the schools. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik lectured
LinuxWorld attendees on the importance of getting Linux into the public
schools. One might argue that his position is a little self-interested,
but, in truth, he has a point. The Linux community should be working at
getting free software into schools worldwide. The effort will benefit both
our children and free software.

One can come up with a number of reasons why the schools should be running
free software. Often it is simply the best alternative available. Schools
do not need to hassle with daily crashes and ongoing security problems.
What they need is stable software that runs on modest, perhaps ancient
hardware and provides the capabilities that students need. For much of
what's done in schools now, Linux is more than adequate.

The financial justification for scholastic Linux requires little argument.
Public schools seem to operate with a chronic cash shortage; it makes
little sense for them to pour large amounts of money into proprietary
software licenses. Schools also should not have to deal with Microsoft
software audits and other such indignities; they should be putting
their efforts into teaching our children.

But the real reason to put free software into the schools is to teach our
children about software freedom and taking control of our computers.
Children who have seen how free software works are likely to remain
interested in using it later in their lives. After all, going back to
proprietary software after using the free variety is usually not very much
fun. Going back to licensing hassles, corporate release schedules, and
black box software after experiencing free redistribution, collaborative
development, and total control can be intolerable. Children who experience
free software in the schools will turn into some of its strongest advocates
later in their lives.

Besides, some of those school kids will probably send in some great
patches.

Of course, there are some obstacles to massive deployments of Linux in the
schools. Many schools have already built infrastructures around
proprietary software; school networks are often run by fairly conservative
people who are not inclined to tear things out and start over again.
Convincing them to give Linux a try could be hard.

Then, there is the lack of high-quality educational software. There is a
whole class of software for tutoring, drilling, and entertainment of
students that is simply not available for Linux. Until more software is
either written or ported, Linux systems will be unable to perform a number
of tasks in the classroom environment.

One thing that would help in the solution of both problems would be a
higher level of hacker interest in school deployments. The number of
educational projects is low; KDE has a short educational
software listing; GNOME has no educational category at all. Neither
desktop project appears to have an organized educational effort. A look at
SourceForge's
educational category turns up a more encouraging 581 projects, but only
66 are listed as being production-ready. Clearly there's some hacking to
be done still.

Free software advocates also have not, as a whole, made school deployments
a priority. It will be interesting to see how that changes as more free
software developers get older and start having children. Having your
children complain that they cannot produce a Word-compatible report tends
to get your attention. Children are the future, and they will have a large
effect on the future of free software as well. The sooner the two are
brought together, the better it will be.

More hard times. In case anybody still needed a confirmation that
we are in a different and difficult economic climate, consider the
following developments:

CNet has shut
down the AppWatch site, which it acquired last year. AppWatch was
a free software directory, along the lines of Freshmeat, but focusing exclusively on
free software. It was a popular site, but that wasn't enough; CNet,
citing the current economic climate, has pulled the plug.

According to this
report in Network World Fusion, IBM and others have put
$45 million into SuSE, which was, apparently, on the edge of
bankruptcy. There's very little information available on this
investment at this time. Combined with Dirk Hohndel's departure, this
investment does indeed make it look like SuSE was in some serious
trouble and is contemplating a change in direction.

Progeny Linux Systems has stated
publicly that its Network of Workstations (NOW) project is no
longer under development, and hasn't been since February.

Shortly after we started the company, though, the financial markets
took a turn for the worse. Like many other young companies, the
market correction forced us to take a nearer-term view of
things. Because of its long-term horizon, the NOW development
efforts often took a back seat to the needs of other projects.

Until such a time as it is once again possible to raise money for
projects like NOW, Progeny is going to have to concentrate on projects
that are more lucrative in the near term.

Seen together, that's a disturbing pile of bad news. The shutdown of
AppWatch suggests that there is not room for more than one large free
software directory on the net. After all, one presumes that CNet knows how
to keep a web site going. The SuSE bailout says something similar: might
there truly be room for only one large Linux distributor? In some ways,
the shutdown of the NOW project is the scariest of all. If the Linux
community is unable to fund and sustain long-term development projects,
where will it be in a few years?

Of course, that view is overly pessimistic on all counts. We are in the
middle of an increasingly severe economic downturn; of course there will be
consequences for Linux businesses just as there is with all other computing
sectors. The easy money boom period of the last 1990's made the problem
worse by funding businesses that never had a serious chance at success
before their bubbles burst. Still, it is a difficult today even for well-run
companies with solid business plans to find profitability.

This, too, shall pass. When it is over, Linux will still be there, getting
stronger, and attracting more users. That much is easy to predict. The
success of Linux says little for the prospects of any individual Linux
company, however. The Linux business community will certainly see more
changes before things pick up again, and they will not all be pleasant.

GFS is no longer free software. The Global Filesystem (GFS)
is a clustered filesystem developed by Sistina. It is meant for the
implementation of high-performance, high-availability filesystems on
"storage area networks." It has long been available under the GPL, and was
considered as a candidate for inclusion into the Linux kernel if and when
the 2.5 series comes into existence.

That was until version 4.2 came out under the new "Sistina Public License."
This license looks somewhat like a free software license, in that source is
available. The similarity ends there, however. Redistribution requires
that a license fee be paid to Sistina; one must also pay if GFS is used to
offer a commercial service, even if the software is not redistributed. The
SPL is certainly not a free software license. It has more of a "shared
source" smell to it.

One can certainly argue that Sistina, as the copyright holder, has the
right to change the licensing on its code. It is yet another business that
is trying to find a way to make money, after all. One would think that
only those who think that proprietary software should be illegal would
complain about this license change.

It is not quite that simple, though. GFS, after all, must be linked into
the Linux kernel to be useful. And linking GFS is not just a matter of
inserting a binary module; it requires some extensive patches to the kernel
source itself. By reaching past the module interface, GFS exceeds the
GPL exemption granted by Linus to binary modules. With the 4.2 release,
Sistina has separated the kernel patches into a separate, GPL-licensed
file, but that is unlikely to satisfy many people.

If they were simply doing a non-free release that used existing
kernel API's I'd be annoyed but not bothered, as it is they seem to
be doing dirtier things and more blatantly than any company before.
I'm hoping they will resolve this sensibly, we shall see.

For now I
think the best approach is to be quiet and reasonable. They've done
something that seems wrong and silly, they should have a few days
to resolve it.

A few days have passed, but Sistina shows no signs of budging.

Meanwhile, the OpenGFS project has
started up, using the last GPL release of GFS as a starting point. Sistina
may well find itself in a position similar to that of SSH Communications
Security - a free version of an early release could overtake its more
recent, proprietary products.

Adobe has published a
new FAQ on the Sklyarov situation. It has, one might say, failed
to mollify those who see Adobe as being at least partially responsible
for Dmitry's arrest.

The U.S. Copyright Office came out with its required study of the
effects of the DMCA; it concluded that, with regard to the
anti-circumvention provision, "the actual impact on consumers appears
to be minimal." The full report is very long; see this
Salon article for a more manageable read.

OpenBSD and OpenSSH hacker Dug Song has pulled his web site, citing a fear
of the DMCA.